June 22, 2025 • 30 mins
CIA analyst turned best-selling spy novelist David McCloskey visits with old friends John & Jerry where they look at the CIA and their experiences in The Middle East before, during and after The Arab Spring. With a survey of what's happening in The Middle East currently.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. I was a
CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts
in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive
our adversaries.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
theories large and small.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Could they be true? Or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 1 (00:26):
This is mission implausible. Today's guest is David McCluskey. He's
actually a friend and a former colleague, and he is
now best known for his best selling spy novels Damasca, Station,
Moscow X and The Seventh Floor, all worth reading. We'll
probably talk about him in the podcast, but he's probably
(00:47):
even better known nowadays, especially in England, for his well
regarded podcast The Rest Is Classified with British security journalist
Gordon Carrera.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
It's good.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
David previously worked at the CIA on issues related to
the Middle East and worked in embassies abroad, but he
was in the sort of snotty, whimpy side of the agency.
Jully and I who were busy saving the world so
that it could be destroyed later. So sorry about that.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
So I can't be friends, you know, Manars and Venus
can d O and d I people. We'll explore that.
I'm sorry over here, you go.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
I was I was trying to translate all the garbage
you were writing up in the field so the people
making the decisions in DC would know what the hell
you were talking about.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
I have lots of questions, but here's where I'd like
to start off with. What is it like now to
be making a living off of our exploits?
Speaker 3 (01:39):
I like I like to I like to say John
that you know, I was certainly not a I was
certainly not a case officer like you out there saving
the world regularly day by day. But but you know
every day. Yeah, what better person to actually be able
to write down on paper those exploits than an analyst, right?
(02:02):
I mean, this is this It's just a continuation of
my sort of prior career right now. Now I get
to write more fantastical stories and UH and occasionally you know,
poke fun at you guys, and UH and some of
my analysts friends as well. So it's not too bad.
It's not too bad.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Yeah, I have to say as we start that when
I entered the agency the first couple of tours, I
was like the agency version of hermaphrodite, sort of a
I was because I was between I was between the
d I, the intelligence guys, the analysts, guys, intelligence folk,
the analysts, and the operations officer, tough guys like John
(02:44):
and both of you, the DI analyst and the do
O operators. Both of you gave me noggies and swirlies
right and looked good.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
Point, this is a real besmirching of our reports, officer friends,
isn't it. It is. It's terrible.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
I all of us deserve a besmirching, So that's not
that's true. I was trying to go on offense til
that my besmirching is a little further down the pike.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
That's true. That's true. Yeah, No, I mean, uh, I
mean analysts, though I don't think they were analysts, weren't
the type to be given out like noggi's and swirlies. Jerry,
and I feel like it was very much a heads down,
eating lunch at your desk crowd for the most part, right,
That's what I remember.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Mostly I got like eye rolls and like oh yeah,
you got oh And then I get use a big
word and I have to go look it up and
realize I've been besmirched.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
But this is an influencing thing. We were talking, We
were talking about this before we even hit record, that
what Jerry just did is a classic case officer influencing
tactic for analysts, which is, when you're sitting down in
a briefing, they tell you, they the case officers, tell
you how smart you are and how they don't know anything,
and how they're just desperate for your knowledge, and then
use the analyst. You know, even if you kind of
(03:54):
know what's happening, you feel good when the briefing starts
right and it's just a classic I swear that they
taught you that somewhere along the line, because I got
every case officer I sat down with ever period.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
I have to get this out, so they get this
out early. We had a a an analyst, a very
senior analyst woman. She came to Manila and we were
talking and you know, around the table, and we were
giving a briefing. And at the time, one of the
terrorist groups, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, was something we
were concerned with. And so the reports officer says, well, well,
(04:31):
there's no way around this, you know. He says that
it's called the MILF, And everybody smiles around the table
except for the analyst, and she's like yeah, and he's
like the mill and uh, she's like and she's like
smart enough to pick up that's supposed to mean something.
He says, well, maybe you should look it up later,
but don't use a government computer.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
Well it was abbreviated milf in' that's the name.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
Yeah, yeah, the MILF. Yeah. Yeah, we're going down. We're
already sort of launching down a path, and conspiracy theories
come out of like the CIA, And David, I was
wondering if you could talk a little bit about maybe
some of the tribes inside of CIA really briefly, and
then discuss what the DII the analysts do, and then
(05:18):
we can sort of talk about conspiracy theories and conspiracies
both within the agency and who gets blamed for conspiracy
theories and so forth. So why don't you why don't
I kick it over to you?
Speaker 3 (05:29):
I'm sure you're well, yeah, I mean, and the most
important tribe is the analyst, because they're the ones writing
and stuff that goes goes to the policymakers, right, that's
what the CIA is there to do. For the most part.
Occasionally we'll spin up some covered action stuff which usually
doesn't go that well. But you know, the analysts are
sort of we're holding the flame. I mean, so the
analysts is certainly one tribe, right, your your case officer
(05:52):
brethren are another.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Relations officers.
Speaker 4 (05:55):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 3 (05:55):
There's there's a whole host of like teers and ness
in tiers. Yeah, yeah, the support guys. But like even
within like the d O, right, there's a bunch of
different sort of you know, there's like a sort of hierarchy.
Speaker 4 (06:08):
Right, And how do you see the hierarchy? That's that's all.
How do I see it in the operations side?
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (06:15):
Well I was thinking that, Yeah, there's there's reports officers,
there's cmos, there's there's sues, right, and I always forgot
what that stood for, essentially, like essentially like an analyst.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
In the d O.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
Is that right? Okay? There were targeting officers, which I
guess could be in either the d I or the
d O, as I recall, you know, interestingly enough, the
last time I went into Langley up in the newly
renovated museum. There is a wall that has a list
of every or what seems like every possible job title
(06:54):
you could have at the CIA, and it is an
entire wall. Have you seen this. It's well, let us in.
Speaker 4 (07:01):
There anymore to be clear.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
And you still have pictures in me on a horse
in Afghanistan. Those are all going we didn't go real
well yeah, yeah, I mean.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
My perception was always the case. Officers believed themselves to
be the reason the entire place existed, and thus the
most important people there thatived believed, yes, believed themselves to
be the most important Who I mean, who else there was?
You know, a variety of techie type roles. There were
those guys in the green jackets who monitored the uh,
the contractors who came in who I always like to
(07:35):
include them in any kind of book, if I could
just randomly throw a reference at them.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (07:40):
You've done a good job with your books. You've thrown
in that you had the hot dog machine, and the hot.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
Dog machine in there, sadly was it was ripped out
at some point in the past decade, probably for like
code violations. I tried to get a reference to the
you know, the gift shop in there as much as
I can, and I used I think John, I actually
took this line from you with permission, of course, because
at one point in some conversation you said that we
stopped being a real spy service as soon as the
(08:06):
gift shop went in. You know, we put that. Put
that in the mouth of.
Speaker 4 (08:11):
The CIA on it the end.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
But David, so there's there's the analysts and the operator,
so the two core tribes. But there's another split, another
schism inside of the agency. And I want to know
which side you fall on. Were you dunkin Donuts or
were you Starbucks? There's two places to get coffee.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
That's right, That's right. You know what I I migrated
over the course of my career. I began as a
dunkin Donuts.
Speaker 4 (08:34):
Man, made more money, went to Starbucks.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
Yeah, exactly. And then once I made gs ten I started,
I went to Starbucks. It was Duncan to start, and
then it became Starbucks. Although I heard a rumor, I
wasn't there. A director at some point wanted to like
rip out the coffee stands, right, I don't know which one.
Speaker 4 (08:52):
Our friends Rob Danberg wanted to do that.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
He oh, Okay, yeah, yeah, get rid of them. But yeah, no,
I'm I became a Starbucks man as it went on,
and there were plenty of my analyst friends who probably
spent good portions of their days kind of like just
milling around the Starbucks writer having various like ostensible work
chats in the cafeteria or at the Starbucks that were
(09:16):
that were not.
Speaker 4 (09:17):
That's why he wanted to rip them out, because.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
Yeah, exactly exactly the strength.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
Let's talk about you for a second. I mean, really,
you have become quite popular both for your books, which
are high praise, but also this podcast, which is newer.
So which do you like better nowadays? The writing or
the podcasting.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Oh that's hard. I mean I enjoy both of them.
I think the writing is the central thing that that
I don't know, I will never I will never stop writing,
and I hope the podcast never stops. But kind of
the central piece of all of it's the books. But
Gordon and I having a ton of fun on the podcast,
and I see it as very like symbiotic with the
writing because it's an opportunity to go into spy stories
(09:58):
that I know some thing about and then actually go
deep and do the research to come up with kind of,
you know, the arc for a tour or four six
part series and and learn a whole bunch of stuff
that I don't I didn't otherwise know, and then frankly,
you know, try to find ways to work some of
that material into books if I can. And so kind
of going into real stuff and finding interesting characters or
(10:22):
situations is really fruitful. So I think the two things
really work well.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
Again, fiction and John's war stories are pretty much the
same thing.
Speaker 4 (10:29):
Yeah, yeah, there I was. It does be an igor.
Let's take a break. We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
So I want to I'm gonna endeavor to say something
good about.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
Analysts, okay, And I know it's gonna be hard for you.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
And it's and I'm going I want to get down
this rabbit hole. And this gets into conspiracies and conspiracy theories.
So one of the bigger ones is IRAQ w WEMD
and it's something that I have an indirect insight into,
and I imagine also you indirect through hearsay and so forth.
But my sense was it is billed as and on
permission to swear, because this is a big one. This
(11:18):
is like a huge agency fuck up. And I think
I'm not going to shy away from that, but I
think the real for me, in any case, the real
conspiracy here is that the Bush administration basically had decided
to go to war, and they built their own with
(11:39):
Doug Fife, they built their own intelligence service in the
Pentagon for a little while for two years to basically
prove that case and to throw out any evidence that
didn't support it. And then of course they went down
the road of Saddam and al Qaeda were very close,
which was completely untrue. And then they said that, you know,
they hooked into a whole host of scammers that claimed
(12:00):
that Saddam had this you know, curveball and all the
rest of this. And my understanding is that the analysts
who wouldn't go along with this were systematically weeded out,
you know, sort of pushed off to the side or
demoted or asked to move off, and that the analyst
at the end said, the evidence that we have indicates
(12:22):
that they likely do. There was sort of probability, I
don't know as high, medium, low, and the White I
said that's not good enough. And George Tennant, who I
think highly uncaved is my understanding, and he said, look,
it's it's yes or no. There's no maybe's here. We're
going to war. Say yes or no, and you'd better
be friggin yes, right, And so they did they said yes.
(12:42):
And so the agency, through a conspiracy, has been stuck
with this has been pinned to us as a one
of our great failures. And I think it's you know,
the analysts are sort of at the center of this,
the pressures on them. So I'm wondering from where you sat,
from what you heard, you weren't involved in this. It's
your sense of pressure on analysts. And this goes today
(13:02):
with this administration to all sorts of things like you know,
where COVID came from and so forth. So I wonder
wonder if you could go into that.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
Yeah, that's my understanding as well. The rock WMD story
is that it's a it is in some sense a
story about analytic failure, because at the time there wasn't
I actually don't think that there were embedded across the DII.
There weren't sort of the the confidence statements and all
these kind of other and frankly, a lot of the
(13:32):
clarity around how good or bad or fragmentary or otherwise
the sourcing was like those were not as consistently embedded
in the assessments, and so it was easier in some ways,
I think, to sort of handwave maybe or for consumers
of the intel to take away different stories from what
(13:53):
they were reading. And a lot of the changes made,
like just as I was joining, were to try to
like systematize the way that we communicated INTEL assessments and
to be very clear about what we knew and what
we didn't know and things like that.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
You know.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
The art of the story you told on Rock WMD,
I think is a that's a particularly egregious example of
the politics kind of dipping in and dictating or really
influencing what the CIA puts down on paper. I think
the politicization of analysis, though it's rarely that easy. I
(14:31):
think to sort of go back and say that's exactly
what happened, I think a Rock WMD, because I mean
my understanding is that sometimes like there were NSC or
Pentagon or White House officials who would literally I mean
it came out to Langley on multiple occasions to like
basically sit with the analysts right and right and like
so I mean that's a lot of pressure right, and
to your point, like, if the decision has already been
(14:52):
made to do this, to go to war, I guess
becomes more of a political question for you know, the
director for the seventh floor to figure out how do
you not lose the trust of the White House, right
if they've already made the decision. But but yeah, I
mean the politicization pressure and sort of I guess the
risk is real and it is really I think hard
(15:15):
to it's not It shouldn't be hard for the line
analysts to navigate because they're the ones that are looking
at the stuff, and ideally they're being backed up the
chain by people who have an interest in like maybe corny,
but like, yeah, speaking the truth regardless of what the
politics are. But there's really many different ways that the
(15:35):
analysis can get politicized at different parts of the chain.
A lot of different people are touching it, and frankly,
stuff can get politicized by what's not written or what's
not reported into the White House or what doesn't get
read in the PDB. So brief yeah, yeah, so you know,
(15:57):
it's a really and it's really subtle, I think, because frankly,
the politicization could start with you know, someone who's editing
one of those pdbs just kind of softening some stuff
a little bit, or saying, is this really a moderate
confidence judgment? This seems more like a low confidence judgment
to me based on this definition, And that's more art
(16:17):
than science. And if something's a low confidence judgment, then
maybe it's you know, maybe it's not worth actually briefing
to the president period. And so it never makes, you know,
it never makes it into any kind of higher level
conversation down in the oval. So there's lots of different ways.
I mean, frankly, i'd be curious for your guys thoughts
on this, And you know, on the collection side, I'd
(16:37):
imagine there's plenty of ways that someone on the seventh
floor in the DdO shop could say on these three
or four topics, I want to see the stuff before
it gets descemnded. And you could decide, for any reason,
you kind of cook up maybe we don't descend this
kind of thing, and because it's gonna set off fireworks downtown,
(16:59):
and maybe I make up some stuff about how the
sourcing's bogus or whatever in order to justify it. So
there's a lot of different ways you could play around
with it. I think throughout the chain, right, I.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Think it's important to discuss what descend means, right. People
that may not realize this. So people like John and I,
we would collect the information from a source what it
just putatively get a human source. He gives us the information.
We don't like hand it to the president. We actually
hand it to a reports office or a CMO and
(17:31):
they take the information, decide how it's written up. Then
it goes to headquarters where they look at it again,
and then they descem it to whomever needs it, whoever
is in need to know, so to the analysts. And
there's always a danger that if that raw disseminated report
goes directly to the White House and it's wrong, or
(17:52):
if it's lanted, then you've got other problems. But so
that's the way it should go. But there's lots of
places to slip TwixT the it fixed the spoon in
the lip, right I mean, and not always to influence it.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
But yeah, if you go to go back to the
WMD a rock WND problem, A lot of people have
gone back after the analysts for making a bad call there,
but frankly there was no good collection then either. So
it was a real intelligence failure. We had no good sources. Really,
we had a White House that decided they needed to
go to war, and we had no Americans living in
the country. We had no good sources, and the analysts
(18:26):
were being pressured to come up with an analytic judgment,
and I think they tried to use what would be logical. Well,
he had WMD before and he tried to hide it,
so we must be doing so again. And so it
was a real problem. And I think we've seen even
more recently. You talked about it in one of your
podcasts recently about the twenty twenty two invasion of Ukraine.
Speaker 4 (18:48):
It seems in that.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Case we actually had good collection. We had some sort
of source or sources. They were telling us that Putin
was about to invade. But some of the analysis clearly
was wrong because we had information Putin was going to invade.
But then were the decision was what's going to happen next?
And essentially our analysts in some fashion must have told
the White House, well, Ukraine's gonna lose quickly, and so
(19:09):
you better get Lenski out of there, and that's not
what happened.
Speaker 4 (19:13):
Someone had to.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Make a decision on how were the Ukrainians willing to fight,
and we obviously did not have good intelligence on that either.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
And David, so you were involved a lot with Syria
that's reflected in your book. You were there for Prog
Prog Spring, Christ dates me for the Arab Spring. Spring
springs and people tend to think, in conspiratorial thinking that
the agency is omnipotent when things surprise us. So like
(19:43):
the Arab Spring, people tend to think that the agency
is involved in prophesying that we've got You guys have
a crystal ball. So I was wondering if you could
give us your senses an analyst of what we could
know about the Arab Spring. Right, a fruit seller gets
slapped in the world falls apart and then whether and
then more recent is like when a sad fell, like
everybody was like holy shit, I mean nobody predicted it.
(20:06):
So I just wondering if you could give folks a
sense of like how you guys are just as much
at sea as the rest of us, right, and it's
not a conspiracy to hide or that we've got all
this information. Yea, this information, we have all this power
that people assume we have.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
I think that The way I would maybe frame it is,
I think making a call on the eruption of mass
sort of popular uprising in the Middle East is a mystery.
It is a sort of mass psychological phenomenon that is
inherently unpredictable and actually nobody is capable of predicting it.
(20:42):
Whereas does Saddam possess chemical, biological weapons whatever is a secret,
We in theory could have collected information that would have,
you know, sort of proved or disproved whether or not
that's true, Which is why I think I would say
to your point, John, I'd never thought about WMD. Actually
is a doo failure, a collection failure that's also a
(21:05):
piece of it. The whole kind of chain failed because
the analysts we didn't have good information, and then the
analysts sort of through pressure and otherwise, you know, messed
up the call. But I think an intelligence failure involves
like are there secrets to collect that should have been
collected or analysis that should have been conducted given the
available information that wasn't right, Whereas I think predicting Syria
(21:29):
it's not possible, and so we certainly did not have
a crystal ball, and most of what the country analysts
were doing in those late twenty ten early twenty eleven
months were either writing pieces that explained sort of what
are the hurdles to a protest movement or to an
insurgency or a civil war, like what has to be
(21:50):
overcome to get there? So said differently, like what would
you have to believe for this to happen? Or writing
scenarios that lay out, you know, three or four worlds
or paths you could travel down should the sort of
security apparatus and general kind of pillars of stability in
a given country start to crumble, And none of us
(22:11):
had any eye. I mean I had friends who were
working on other you know, milliased accounts at that point
in time, who were literally writing essentially writing pieces that
had them in draft form that were like, this is
why it's not going to happen here, and then the
protest movement would start to May would be like delete these,
you know, So like no one saw that stuff coming, right,
I mean no more than like nobody saw the sort
(22:34):
of collapse of communism across Eastern Europe happening so quickly
in eighty nine either, right, So it's just it's not predictable.
Those kind of mass events.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
Well, I don't know. I don't know about that. I
mean I went to West Berlin in the in April
of eighty nine, and you know, five months later it
all fell apart, the wall came down. Coincidence.
Speaker 4 (23:01):
Well, I'm in analysis right there.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
In my mind.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
No, and more of this enlightening banter after a quick break.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
Just because I was sort of involved in this. It
was also a process issue. So there was this source
called Curveball. Now Curveball, he was the main source. Singles
never do things on single source. He was the main
source that told us with great confidence and specificity about
the state of the WND programs. And Curveball was living
(23:51):
in Munich at the time, and German Station and I
got a pretty good view into this talked to the
Germans about him because he refus to meet the CIA,
but he did talk to the German intelligence and he said,
I won't meet the CIA, but you know, you can
give their information to HIT to them, to US intelligence.
I think the station took a look at his stuff
(24:12):
and said, we can't verify any of this and maybe
it's true, maybe it's not, but it's like we can't
verify it. So it's really not any good. And then
what happened is the military came in and they said, well,
we'll do it, right, but they didn't tell the station.
So all that reporting that went out went out through
the US military, and we in the station and our
(24:33):
analysts were getting it, but we didn't know where it
was coming from, right, I mean, we didn't have a
need to know that it was coming out of Munich.
And it only sort of at the very end did
we solve that. Yeah, it was like.
Speaker 3 (24:44):
A big circular references.
Speaker 4 (24:46):
This is that same guy.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
There's the same guy. And I think it's been in
the press that the station chief actually wrote and said,
I hope this isn't the case, and Tyler Drumhill are famously,
again according to the media, went and said, I hope
you're not basing it and on this guy in Munich
on curveball, And by then it was sort of too late.
But the process, the military and you know, they they
(25:09):
talked to each other, but they didn't talk about sourcing
to each other, right, So it gets I don't want
to get too much into the weeds, but yeah, it
was also a process issue for sure.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
And the way I remember this kind of rolling Downhill.
To me as an analyst when I joined a few
years after, this was being really really explicit. When you're
writing a finished intelligence product. You know, you're not giving
obviously the name of the source, you're not describing where
they work, but you don't cure like like extensive descriptions
(25:37):
of how much confidence we have in the source and
whether they actually have good access and all of that,
like have they been vetted? So there's there was a
lot more information that got included post like three oh
four oh five than if you go back and read
stuff that was written in one or two, like oftentimes
the sourcing statements were very thin.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
Trust me, dude, you know that it's a sourcing statement.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
Yeah, yeah, I mean kind of yeah, that's the way
it read.
Speaker 4 (26:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
To go back to Syria, I think Syria is a
big deal. Like there was environmental concerns and things that
led to you know, lots of people leaving Syria, which
led to problems in Europe and political problems that related
to immigration and things that put pressure on political leaders.
What do you think is happening now? Do you think
this is a policy question not an intelligence question? Do
you think we are handling it well, we have a
(26:27):
new leader in Syria, and it sounds to me like,
you know, the administration wants to sort of blow him off,
and I worry that more problems in Syria are a
potential problem for outside of Syria as well.
Speaker 3 (26:39):
Yeah, I'm weirdly as an analyst. I'm a natural pessimist,
and I think Syria for like fifteen years, has given
me plenty of reasons to be pessimistic about pretty much everything,
a lot of reasons to continue to be pessimistic, although
strangely enough, at this point I'm sort of cautiously hopeful
or optimistic about the future. I mean, and it is.
It's not to say that I think it's possible that
(27:00):
we get like a flowering Jeffersonian democracy in Syria. That
seems unlikely, but I think it's also very possible, if
not even likely, that we get a better outcome than
Assad by a wide margin in terms of it is
a low bar, but I think it's it's possible that
(27:21):
we end up with a Syria that is at least
not sort of actively creating, you know, massive problems for
all of its neighbors, and maybe hopefully in the future
politically more stable and also more open, right than the
regime Osad Ran and frankly managing you know, it's repressive
(27:41):
apparatus on a much less sort of industrial horrific scale.
We will cross that bar for sure, right is that
this is going to be a far less repressive regime
than the one oside Ran. That's said, I mean, you
know where to start with the problems. And frankly, you know,
even though we still have true groups in the northeast,
I think maybe about nine hundred or so that are
(28:04):
there supporting our comrades in the SDF, the Syrian Democratic Forces.
You know, I don't think this administration has any Do
they have a Syria policy or an interest in developing one?
I mean, and if so, what would it even be.
You know, I think this is kind of one of
those pockets of the world that's just probably not going
(28:25):
to be getting a lot of interest from Trump two
point zero.
Speaker 4 (28:28):
But it will be getting a lot of interest from
Israel and Turkey.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
And we will be getting a lot of interest from
Israel and Turkey, and I think they're the two major
geopolitical winners here. I read that the Israeli Air Force
in the days after Osad fled flew more air sorties
over Syria than they had in any day in any
conflict since nineteen sixty seven. They essentially destroyed most of
(28:53):
Syria's military capacity in like about seventy two hours. And
the Turks, you know, have are probably the group with
the most influence both in the North and then with
the new new crew in Damascus, so big winners. Iran
US not so much. So we'll see.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
We just need an independent Curtis stan that'll fix it exactly.
Speaker 3 (29:15):
I've got an idea for the Middle East. I do
feel I mean, I do feel bad for that. It's
like the Kurds is just the constant every time, like
every time at one of these conflicts ends, it's the
Kurds end up getting screwed. So it's really tragic.
Speaker 5 (29:30):
We're gonna stop here for today and continue next week
with more of our conversation with David McCloskey here on
Mission Implausible. Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'sha,
John Ceipher, and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner.
(29:51):
Mission Implausible It's a production of honorable mention and abominable
pictures for iHeart podcasts,
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. I was a
CIA officer stationed around the world in high threat posts
in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive
our adversaries.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
theories large and small.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Could they be true? Or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 1 (00:26):
This is mission implausible. Today's guest is David McCluskey. He's
actually a friend and a former colleague, and he is
now best known for his best selling spy novels Damasca, Station,
Moscow X and The Seventh Floor, all worth reading. We'll
probably talk about him in the podcast, but he's probably
(00:47):
even better known nowadays, especially in England, for his well
regarded podcast The Rest Is Classified with British security journalist
Gordon Carrera.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
It's good.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
David previously worked at the CIA on issues related to
the Middle East and worked in embassies abroad, but he
was in the sort of snotty, whimpy side of the agency.
Jully and I who were busy saving the world so
that it could be destroyed later. So sorry about that.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
So I can't be friends, you know, Manars and Venus
can d O and d I people. We'll explore that.
I'm sorry over here, you go.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
I was I was trying to translate all the garbage
you were writing up in the field so the people
making the decisions in DC would know what the hell
you were talking about.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
I have lots of questions, but here's where I'd like
to start off with. What is it like now to
be making a living off of our exploits?
Speaker 3 (01:39):
I like I like to I like to say John
that you know, I was certainly not a I was
certainly not a case officer like you out there saving
the world regularly day by day. But but you know
every day. Yeah, what better person to actually be able
to write down on paper those exploits than an analyst, right?
(02:02):
I mean, this is this It's just a continuation of
my sort of prior career right now. Now I get
to write more fantastical stories and UH and occasionally you know,
poke fun at you guys, and UH and some of
my analysts friends as well. So it's not too bad.
It's not too bad.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Yeah, I have to say as we start that when
I entered the agency the first couple of tours, I
was like the agency version of hermaphrodite, sort of a
I was because I was between I was between the
d I, the intelligence guys, the analysts, guys, intelligence folk,
the analysts, and the operations officer, tough guys like John
(02:44):
and both of you, the DI analyst and the do
O operators. Both of you gave me noggies and swirlies
right and looked good.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
Point, this is a real besmirching of our reports, officer friends,
isn't it. It is. It's terrible.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
I all of us deserve a besmirching, So that's not
that's true. I was trying to go on offense til
that my besmirching is a little further down the pike.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
That's true. That's true. Yeah, No, I mean, uh, I
mean analysts, though I don't think they were analysts, weren't
the type to be given out like noggi's and swirlies. Jerry,
and I feel like it was very much a heads down,
eating lunch at your desk crowd for the most part, right,
That's what I remember.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Mostly I got like eye rolls and like oh yeah,
you got oh And then I get use a big
word and I have to go look it up and
realize I've been besmirched.
Speaker 3 (03:33):
But this is an influencing thing. We were talking, We
were talking about this before we even hit record, that
what Jerry just did is a classic case officer influencing
tactic for analysts, which is, when you're sitting down in
a briefing, they tell you, they the case officers, tell
you how smart you are and how they don't know anything,
and how they're just desperate for your knowledge, and then
use the analyst. You know, even if you kind of
(03:54):
know what's happening, you feel good when the briefing starts
right and it's just a classic I swear that they
taught you that somewhere along the line, because I got
every case officer I sat down with ever period.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
I have to get this out, so they get this
out early. We had a a an analyst, a very
senior analyst woman. She came to Manila and we were
talking and you know, around the table, and we were
giving a briefing. And at the time, one of the
terrorist groups, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, was something we
were concerned with. And so the reports officer says, well, well,
(04:31):
there's no way around this, you know. He says that
it's called the MILF, And everybody smiles around the table
except for the analyst, and she's like yeah, and he's
like the mill and uh, she's like and she's like
smart enough to pick up that's supposed to mean something.
He says, well, maybe you should look it up later,
but don't use a government computer.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
Well it was abbreviated milf in' that's the name.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
Yeah, yeah, the MILF. Yeah. Yeah, we're going down. We're
already sort of launching down a path, and conspiracy theories
come out of like the CIA, And David, I was
wondering if you could talk a little bit about maybe
some of the tribes inside of CIA really briefly, and
then discuss what the DII the analysts do, and then
(05:18):
we can sort of talk about conspiracy theories and conspiracies
both within the agency and who gets blamed for conspiracy
theories and so forth. So why don't you why don't
I kick it over to you?
Speaker 3 (05:29):
I'm sure you're well, yeah, I mean, and the most
important tribe is the analyst, because they're the ones writing
and stuff that goes goes to the policymakers, right, that's
what the CIA is there to do. For the most part.
Occasionally we'll spin up some covered action stuff which usually
doesn't go that well. But you know, the analysts are
sort of we're holding the flame. I mean, so the
analysts is certainly one tribe, right, your your case officer
(05:52):
brethren are another.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Relations officers.
Speaker 4 (05:55):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 3 (05:55):
There's there's a whole host of like teers and ness
in tiers. Yeah, yeah, the support guys. But like even
within like the d O, right, there's a bunch of
different sort of you know, there's like a sort of hierarchy.
Speaker 4 (06:08):
Right, And how do you see the hierarchy? That's that's all.
How do I see it in the operations side?
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (06:15):
Well I was thinking that, Yeah, there's there's reports officers,
there's cmos, there's there's sues, right, and I always forgot
what that stood for, essentially, like essentially like an analyst.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
In the d O.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
Is that right? Okay? There were targeting officers, which I
guess could be in either the d I or the
d O, as I recall, you know, interestingly enough, the
last time I went into Langley up in the newly
renovated museum. There is a wall that has a list
of every or what seems like every possible job title
(06:54):
you could have at the CIA, and it is an
entire wall. Have you seen this. It's well, let us in.
Speaker 4 (07:01):
There anymore to be clear.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
And you still have pictures in me on a horse
in Afghanistan. Those are all going we didn't go real
well yeah, yeah, I mean.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
My perception was always the case. Officers believed themselves to
be the reason the entire place existed, and thus the
most important people there thatived believed, yes, believed themselves to
be the most important Who I mean, who else there was?
You know, a variety of techie type roles. There were
those guys in the green jackets who monitored the uh,
the contractors who came in who I always like to
(07:35):
include them in any kind of book, if I could
just randomly throw a reference at them.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (07:40):
You've done a good job with your books. You've thrown
in that you had the hot dog machine, and the hot.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
Dog machine in there, sadly was it was ripped out
at some point in the past decade, probably for like
code violations. I tried to get a reference to the
you know, the gift shop in there as much as
I can, and I used I think John, I actually
took this line from you with permission, of course, because
at one point in some conversation you said that we
stopped being a real spy service as soon as the
(08:06):
gift shop went in. You know, we put that. Put
that in the mouth of.
Speaker 4 (08:11):
The CIA on it the end.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
But David, so there's there's the analysts and the operator,
so the two core tribes. But there's another split, another
schism inside of the agency. And I want to know
which side you fall on. Were you dunkin Donuts or
were you Starbucks? There's two places to get coffee.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
That's right, That's right. You know what I I migrated
over the course of my career. I began as a
dunkin Donuts.
Speaker 4 (08:34):
Man, made more money, went to Starbucks.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
Yeah, exactly. And then once I made gs ten I started,
I went to Starbucks. It was Duncan to start, and
then it became Starbucks. Although I heard a rumor, I
wasn't there. A director at some point wanted to like
rip out the coffee stands, right, I don't know which one.
Speaker 4 (08:52):
Our friends Rob Danberg wanted to do that.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
He oh, Okay, yeah, yeah, get rid of them. But yeah, no,
I'm I became a Starbucks man as it went on,
and there were plenty of my analyst friends who probably
spent good portions of their days kind of like just
milling around the Starbucks writer having various like ostensible work
chats in the cafeteria or at the Starbucks that were
(09:16):
that were not.
Speaker 4 (09:17):
That's why he wanted to rip them out, because.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
Yeah, exactly exactly the strength.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
Let's talk about you for a second. I mean, really,
you have become quite popular both for your books, which
are high praise, but also this podcast, which is newer.
So which do you like better nowadays? The writing or
the podcasting.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Oh that's hard. I mean I enjoy both of them.
I think the writing is the central thing that that
I don't know, I will never I will never stop writing,
and I hope the podcast never stops. But kind of
the central piece of all of it's the books. But
Gordon and I having a ton of fun on the podcast,
and I see it as very like symbiotic with the
writing because it's an opportunity to go into spy stories
(09:58):
that I know some thing about and then actually go
deep and do the research to come up with kind of,
you know, the arc for a tour or four six
part series and and learn a whole bunch of stuff
that I don't I didn't otherwise know, and then frankly,
you know, try to find ways to work some of
that material into books if I can. And so kind
of going into real stuff and finding interesting characters or
(10:22):
situations is really fruitful. So I think the two things
really work well.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
Again, fiction and John's war stories are pretty much the
same thing.
Speaker 4 (10:29):
Yeah, yeah, there I was. It does be an igor.
Let's take a break. We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
So I want to I'm gonna endeavor to say something
good about.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
Analysts, okay, And I know it's gonna be hard for you.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
And it's and I'm going I want to get down
this rabbit hole. And this gets into conspiracies and conspiracy theories.
So one of the bigger ones is IRAQ w WEMD
and it's something that I have an indirect insight into,
and I imagine also you indirect through hearsay and so forth.
But my sense was it is billed as and on
permission to swear, because this is a big one. This
(11:18):
is like a huge agency fuck up. And I think
I'm not going to shy away from that, but I
think the real for me, in any case, the real
conspiracy here is that the Bush administration basically had decided
to go to war, and they built their own with
(11:39):
Doug Fife, they built their own intelligence service in the
Pentagon for a little while for two years to basically
prove that case and to throw out any evidence that
didn't support it. And then of course they went down
the road of Saddam and al Qaeda were very close,
which was completely untrue. And then they said that, you know,
they hooked into a whole host of scammers that claimed
(12:00):
that Saddam had this you know, curveball and all the
rest of this. And my understanding is that the analysts
who wouldn't go along with this were systematically weeded out,
you know, sort of pushed off to the side or
demoted or asked to move off, and that the analyst
at the end said, the evidence that we have indicates
(12:22):
that they likely do. There was sort of probability, I
don't know as high, medium, low, and the White I
said that's not good enough. And George Tennant, who I
think highly uncaved is my understanding, and he said, look,
it's it's yes or no. There's no maybe's here. We're
going to war. Say yes or no, and you'd better
be friggin yes, right, And so they did they said yes.
(12:42):
And so the agency, through a conspiracy, has been stuck
with this has been pinned to us as a one
of our great failures. And I think it's you know,
the analysts are sort of at the center of this,
the pressures on them. So I'm wondering from where you sat,
from what you heard, you weren't involved in this. It's
your sense of pressure on analysts. And this goes today
(13:02):
with this administration to all sorts of things like you know,
where COVID came from and so forth. So I wonder
wonder if you could go into that.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
Yeah, that's my understanding as well. The rock WMD story
is that it's a it is in some sense a
story about analytic failure, because at the time there wasn't
I actually don't think that there were embedded across the DII.
There weren't sort of the the confidence statements and all
these kind of other and frankly, a lot of the
(13:32):
clarity around how good or bad or fragmentary or otherwise
the sourcing was like those were not as consistently embedded
in the assessments, and so it was easier in some ways,
I think, to sort of handwave maybe or for consumers
of the intel to take away different stories from what
(13:53):
they were reading. And a lot of the changes made,
like just as I was joining, were to try to
like systematize the way that we communicated INTEL assessments and
to be very clear about what we knew and what
we didn't know and things like that.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
You know.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
The art of the story you told on Rock WMD,
I think is a that's a particularly egregious example of
the politics kind of dipping in and dictating or really
influencing what the CIA puts down on paper. I think
the politicization of analysis, though it's rarely that easy. I
(14:31):
think to sort of go back and say that's exactly
what happened, I think a Rock WMD, because I mean
my understanding is that sometimes like there were NSC or
Pentagon or White House officials who would literally I mean
it came out to Langley on multiple occasions to like
basically sit with the analysts right and right and like
so I mean that's a lot of pressure right, and
to your point, like, if the decision has already been
(14:52):
made to do this, to go to war, I guess
becomes more of a political question for you know, the
director for the seventh floor to figure out how do
you not lose the trust of the White House, right
if they've already made the decision. But but yeah, I
mean the politicization pressure and sort of I guess the
risk is real and it is really I think hard
(15:15):
to it's not It shouldn't be hard for the line
analysts to navigate because they're the ones that are looking
at the stuff, and ideally they're being backed up the
chain by people who have an interest in like maybe corny,
but like, yeah, speaking the truth regardless of what the
politics are. But there's really many different ways that the
(15:35):
analysis can get politicized at different parts of the chain.
A lot of different people are touching it, and frankly,
stuff can get politicized by what's not written or what's
not reported into the White House or what doesn't get
read in the PDB. So brief yeah, yeah, so you know,
(15:57):
it's a really and it's really subtle, I think, because frankly,
the politicization could start with you know, someone who's editing
one of those pdbs just kind of softening some stuff
a little bit, or saying, is this really a moderate
confidence judgment? This seems more like a low confidence judgment
to me based on this definition, And that's more art
(16:17):
than science. And if something's a low confidence judgment, then
maybe it's you know, maybe it's not worth actually briefing
to the president period. And so it never makes, you know,
it never makes it into any kind of higher level
conversation down in the oval. So there's lots of different ways.
I mean, frankly, i'd be curious for your guys thoughts
on this, And you know, on the collection side, I'd
(16:37):
imagine there's plenty of ways that someone on the seventh
floor in the DdO shop could say on these three
or four topics, I want to see the stuff before
it gets descemnded. And you could decide, for any reason,
you kind of cook up maybe we don't descend this
kind of thing, and because it's gonna set off fireworks downtown,
(16:59):
and maybe I make up some stuff about how the
sourcing's bogus or whatever in order to justify it. So
there's a lot of different ways you could play around
with it. I think throughout the chain, right, I.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Think it's important to discuss what descend means, right. People
that may not realize this. So people like John and I,
we would collect the information from a source what it
just putatively get a human source. He gives us the information.
We don't like hand it to the president. We actually
hand it to a reports office or a CMO and
(17:31):
they take the information, decide how it's written up. Then
it goes to headquarters where they look at it again,
and then they descem it to whomever needs it, whoever
is in need to know, so to the analysts. And
there's always a danger that if that raw disseminated report
goes directly to the White House and it's wrong, or
(17:52):
if it's lanted, then you've got other problems. But so
that's the way it should go. But there's lots of
places to slip TwixT the it fixed the spoon in
the lip, right I mean, and not always to influence it.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
But yeah, if you go to go back to the
WMD a rock WND problem, A lot of people have
gone back after the analysts for making a bad call there,
but frankly there was no good collection then either. So
it was a real intelligence failure. We had no good sources. Really,
we had a White House that decided they needed to
go to war, and we had no Americans living in
the country. We had no good sources, and the analysts
(18:26):
were being pressured to come up with an analytic judgment,
and I think they tried to use what would be logical. Well,
he had WMD before and he tried to hide it,
so we must be doing so again. And so it
was a real problem. And I think we've seen even
more recently. You talked about it in one of your
podcasts recently about the twenty twenty two invasion of Ukraine.
Speaker 4 (18:48):
It seems in that.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Case we actually had good collection. We had some sort
of source or sources. They were telling us that Putin
was about to invade. But some of the analysis clearly
was wrong because we had information Putin was going to invade.
But then were the decision was what's going to happen next?
And essentially our analysts in some fashion must have told
the White House, well, Ukraine's gonna lose quickly, and so
(19:09):
you better get Lenski out of there, and that's not
what happened.
Speaker 4 (19:13):
Someone had to.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Make a decision on how were the Ukrainians willing to fight,
and we obviously did not have good intelligence on that either.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
And David, so you were involved a lot with Syria
that's reflected in your book. You were there for Prog
Prog Spring, Christ dates me for the Arab Spring. Spring
springs and people tend to think, in conspiratorial thinking that
the agency is omnipotent when things surprise us. So like
(19:43):
the Arab Spring, people tend to think that the agency
is involved in prophesying that we've got You guys have
a crystal ball. So I was wondering if you could
give us your senses an analyst of what we could
know about the Arab Spring. Right, a fruit seller gets
slapped in the world falls apart and then whether and
then more recent is like when a sad fell, like
everybody was like holy shit, I mean nobody predicted it.
(20:06):
So I just wondering if you could give folks a
sense of like how you guys are just as much
at sea as the rest of us, right, and it's
not a conspiracy to hide or that we've got all
this information. Yea, this information, we have all this power
that people assume we have.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
I think that The way I would maybe frame it is,
I think making a call on the eruption of mass
sort of popular uprising in the Middle East is a mystery.
It is a sort of mass psychological phenomenon that is
inherently unpredictable and actually nobody is capable of predicting it.
(20:42):
Whereas does Saddam possess chemical, biological weapons whatever is a secret,
We in theory could have collected information that would have,
you know, sort of proved or disproved whether or not
that's true, Which is why I think I would say
to your point, John, I'd never thought about WMD. Actually
is a doo failure, a collection failure that's also a
(21:05):
piece of it. The whole kind of chain failed because
the analysts we didn't have good information, and then the
analysts sort of through pressure and otherwise, you know, messed
up the call. But I think an intelligence failure involves
like are there secrets to collect that should have been
collected or analysis that should have been conducted given the
available information that wasn't right, Whereas I think predicting Syria
(21:29):
it's not possible, and so we certainly did not have
a crystal ball, and most of what the country analysts
were doing in those late twenty ten early twenty eleven
months were either writing pieces that explained sort of what
are the hurdles to a protest movement or to an
insurgency or a civil war, like what has to be
(21:50):
overcome to get there? So said differently, like what would
you have to believe for this to happen? Or writing
scenarios that lay out, you know, three or four worlds
or paths you could travel down should the sort of
security apparatus and general kind of pillars of stability in
a given country start to crumble, And none of us
(22:11):
had any eye. I mean I had friends who were
working on other you know, milliased accounts at that point
in time, who were literally writing essentially writing pieces that
had them in draft form that were like, this is
why it's not going to happen here, and then the
protest movement would start to May would be like delete these,
you know, So like no one saw that stuff coming, right,
I mean no more than like nobody saw the sort
(22:34):
of collapse of communism across Eastern Europe happening so quickly
in eighty nine either, right, So it's just it's not predictable.
Those kind of mass events.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
Well, I don't know. I don't know about that. I
mean I went to West Berlin in the in April
of eighty nine, and you know, five months later it
all fell apart, the wall came down. Coincidence.
Speaker 4 (23:01):
Well, I'm in analysis right there.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
In my mind.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
No, and more of this enlightening banter after a quick break.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
Just because I was sort of involved in this. It
was also a process issue. So there was this source
called Curveball. Now Curveball, he was the main source. Singles
never do things on single source. He was the main
source that told us with great confidence and specificity about
the state of the WND programs. And Curveball was living
(23:51):
in Munich at the time, and German Station and I
got a pretty good view into this talked to the
Germans about him because he refus to meet the CIA,
but he did talk to the German intelligence and he said,
I won't meet the CIA, but you know, you can
give their information to HIT to them, to US intelligence.
I think the station took a look at his stuff
(24:12):
and said, we can't verify any of this and maybe
it's true, maybe it's not, but it's like we can't
verify it. So it's really not any good. And then
what happened is the military came in and they said, well,
we'll do it, right, but they didn't tell the station.
So all that reporting that went out went out through
the US military, and we in the station and our
(24:33):
analysts were getting it, but we didn't know where it
was coming from, right, I mean, we didn't have a
need to know that it was coming out of Munich.
And it only sort of at the very end did
we solve that. Yeah, it was like.
Speaker 3 (24:44):
A big circular references.
Speaker 4 (24:46):
This is that same guy.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
There's the same guy. And I think it's been in
the press that the station chief actually wrote and said,
I hope this isn't the case, and Tyler Drumhill are famously,
again according to the media, went and said, I hope
you're not basing it and on this guy in Munich
on curveball, And by then it was sort of too late.
But the process, the military and you know, they they
(25:09):
talked to each other, but they didn't talk about sourcing
to each other, right, So it gets I don't want
to get too much into the weeds, but yeah, it
was also a process issue for sure.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
And the way I remember this kind of rolling Downhill.
To me as an analyst when I joined a few
years after, this was being really really explicit. When you're
writing a finished intelligence product. You know, you're not giving
obviously the name of the source, you're not describing where
they work, but you don't cure like like extensive descriptions
(25:37):
of how much confidence we have in the source and
whether they actually have good access and all of that,
like have they been vetted? So there's there was a
lot more information that got included post like three oh
four oh five than if you go back and read
stuff that was written in one or two, like oftentimes
the sourcing statements were very thin.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
Trust me, dude, you know that it's a sourcing statement.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
Yeah, yeah, I mean kind of yeah, that's the way
it read.
Speaker 4 (26:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
To go back to Syria, I think Syria is a
big deal. Like there was environmental concerns and things that
led to you know, lots of people leaving Syria, which
led to problems in Europe and political problems that related
to immigration and things that put pressure on political leaders.
What do you think is happening now? Do you think
this is a policy question not an intelligence question? Do
you think we are handling it well, we have a
(26:27):
new leader in Syria, and it sounds to me like,
you know, the administration wants to sort of blow him off,
and I worry that more problems in Syria are a
potential problem for outside of Syria as well.
Speaker 3 (26:39):
Yeah, I'm weirdly as an analyst. I'm a natural pessimist,
and I think Syria for like fifteen years, has given
me plenty of reasons to be pessimistic about pretty much everything,
a lot of reasons to continue to be pessimistic, although
strangely enough, at this point I'm sort of cautiously hopeful
or optimistic about the future. I mean, and it is.
It's not to say that I think it's possible that
(27:00):
we get like a flowering Jeffersonian democracy in Syria. That
seems unlikely, but I think it's also very possible, if
not even likely, that we get a better outcome than
Assad by a wide margin in terms of it is
a low bar, but I think it's it's possible that
(27:21):
we end up with a Syria that is at least
not sort of actively creating, you know, massive problems for
all of its neighbors, and maybe hopefully in the future
politically more stable and also more open, right than the
regime Osad Ran and frankly managing you know, it's repressive
(27:41):
apparatus on a much less sort of industrial horrific scale.
We will cross that bar for sure, right is that
this is going to be a far less repressive regime
than the one oside Ran. That's said, I mean, you
know where to start with the problems. And frankly, you know,
even though we still have true groups in the northeast,
I think maybe about nine hundred or so that are
(28:04):
there supporting our comrades in the SDF, the Syrian Democratic Forces.
You know, I don't think this administration has any Do
they have a Syria policy or an interest in developing one?
I mean, and if so, what would it even be.
You know, I think this is kind of one of
those pockets of the world that's just probably not going
(28:25):
to be getting a lot of interest from Trump two
point zero.
Speaker 4 (28:28):
But it will be getting a lot of interest from
Israel and Turkey.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
And we will be getting a lot of interest from
Israel and Turkey, and I think they're the two major
geopolitical winners here. I read that the Israeli Air Force
in the days after Osad fled flew more air sorties
over Syria than they had in any day in any
conflict since nineteen sixty seven. They essentially destroyed most of
(28:53):
Syria's military capacity in like about seventy two hours. And
the Turks, you know, have are probably the group with
the most influence both in the North and then with
the new new crew in Damascus, so big winners. Iran
US not so much. So we'll see.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
We just need an independent Curtis stan that'll fix it exactly.
Speaker 3 (29:15):
I've got an idea for the Middle East. I do
feel I mean, I do feel bad for that. It's
like the Kurds is just the constant every time, like
every time at one of these conflicts ends, it's the
Kurds end up getting screwed. So it's really tragic.
Speaker 5 (29:30):
We're gonna stop here for today and continue next week
with more of our conversation with David McCloskey here on
Mission Implausible. Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'sha,
John Ceipher, and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner.
(29:51):
Mission Implausible It's a production of honorable mention and abominable
pictures for iHeart podcasts,
Hosts And Creators
Adam Davidson
John Sipher
Jerry O'Shea
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